The Internet is a Non-place; A Waste of Time and A Big Joke

Is it really?

A very old (in this day and age anyways) Newsweek Article written by Clifford Stoll, took a rather opinionated stance on the Internet and its future.  Clifford veered so far off the road that it is almost funny now, that he made these statements.  A decade after he said it all, he seems to have been moved by the sheer weight of his own predictions that went totally wrong.   Here are a few points he mentioned:

No Telecommuters, No virtual communities and no e-commerce

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic……Baloney

Baloney, Indeed! What can explain the paradigm shift in the way work gets done today? What about telecommuting being a trend that even the U.S President Barrack Obama couldn’t help but notice? Even huge companies like Goldman Sachs and Booz Allen Hamilton have introduced “telecommuting benefits”  for their respective employees. The recent statistics state that there are over 14 million telecommuters in the U.S alone, according to a 2009 Gartner report.

The rise of Twitter, Linked In and Facebook together would crushed his other statements made on the foolhardiness of the visionaries who saw the emergence of powerful online networks which can single-handedly twist the arms of the biggest multi-nationals in a moment.

No Information, No Impact on government and e-learning

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Online education has been growing relentlessly. Not only are virtual class rooms possible but also interactive in nature. So much has changed since the first generation of e-learning that we now have collaborative learning, multimedia enabled learning and learning from the web using social media, etc.

Newspapers in print are giving way to newspapers online. The newspaper behemoths like nytimes.com and WSJ have taken to Twitter and other forms of social media platforms to dispense news.  Needless to say, it is far more convenient now to log into nytimes/washington post/ WSJ online and from any part of the world that it is to spread the newspaper out and actually sit down to read it.

Government monitors online activity relentlessly while it extends its through the Internet on the other hand. For U.S citizens, the right to information act makes it mandatory for government agencies to host information through Usa.gov.

Internet…a non-place to surrender your time?

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth.

Poor guy had no way of knowing that this  very “non-place” makes “everyone surrender  time”.  Individuals, businesses, consumers and everyone else who is wondering about the Internet is now online. Tables have changed for the advertising industry, networking is clicks away, no one meets over coffee if they can chat over facebook.  And if no one prefers cybersex to the real thing,why does brazzers.com have an alexa rank of 473 and only about 384 in the U.S?

I know it’s old milk that got spilt over, but Internet really turned out be something Clifford Stoll never envisioned. What do you think? Have you read the article?  What is your point of view?